Wouldnt it be great if you can see your growth metrics at a glance whenever you want.

Understanding growth: how UTM tags work


### What are UTM tags?

‍UTM codes are a widely accepted technique to understand one's analytics better. These codes help you to understand the sources of traffic.

UTM codes are little parameters in URLs to track the origin of a visitor to your website. You might have seen them in the address bar when you clicked a button in an email or a link on Twitter. Here's an example:
<img align="left" width="100%" src="how-do-utm-tags-work/addressbar-utm-tags.png">

UTM parameters are also supported out-of-the-box by Google Analytics. They were introduced by Urchin, the company that laid the groundwork for Google Analytics before the search engine giant acquired them in April 2005. That's correct; Google itself didn't invent the most popular Javascript snippet on the web. The UTM tags are automatically parsed from the URL and populated to reports and dashboards to allow segmentation in your website traffic.

### How to use UTM paramaters

UTM appended links are useful for analyzing your visitor's traffic sources. When used right, you'll save yourself much time in the future.

Generating UTM appended links might seem hard to generate by hand. Fortunately, there is simple tooling available on the web to enrich your URLs easily.

In the example URL above, you see three different UTM codes:

| code             | description                                            |
| ---------------- | ------------------------------------------------------ |
| **utm_source**   | identifies the source of a visitor, e.g., twitter      |
| **utm_medium**   | identifies the medium of a visitor, e.g., social       |
| **utm_campaign** | identifies the campaign of a visitor, e.g., new_office |

Two more tags are utm_content and utm_term, which are less popular but used when more in-depth segmentation is needed. E.g., when running A/B tests or tracking keywords in a Google Adwords campaign.

Four easy steps to easily add the parameters to your URL:

- Choose the **destination URL**, the page you would like to send your visitors to, e.g., brightcity.co
- Choose **utm_source** tag, e.g., twitter
- Choose **utm_medium** tag, e.g., social
- Choose **utm_campaign** tag, e.g., example

Your URL will look like this: _https://www.brightcity.co/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=example_

Once you have created a URL with your UTM tags, you can now add them wherever you want to use them. Use them in your newsletters, social media posts, and ads. Once clicked, the visitor will be able to see the URL in the address bars, so be cautious with the tags you use. You can also shorten your UTM appended links by using a URL shortener.

### Examples and best practices

Consistency is essential when it comes to UTM tracking. It will avoid much confusion and makes analyzing campaigns less of a tedious and error-prone task.

<img align="center" width="100%" src="how-do-utm-tags-work/utm-tag-examples.jpg">

UTM tracking can quickly get complicated, especially when you work in a bigger team or organization. It's essential to set the UTM rules for consistent usages of parameters. In the screenshot below, you see an example of inconsistent usage of parameters. Google Analytics is case sensitive. E.g., utm_source=Twitter is different from utm_source=twitter and will be identified as a separate source.

<img align="left" width="50%" src="how-do-utm-tags-work/importance-of-consistency.jpg">

There is an ongoing debate on whether email is the source or medium when adding UTM tags to a link. Whereas my personals preference is email as the source and newsletter as the medium, there is no right or wrong as long as you are consistent. Remember, with UTM tracking, consistently wrong is also fine.

<br />

### How to analyze UTM parameters?

All major analytics software support UTM tracking. In Google Analytics, you can see the traffic segmented by source and medium in the **Acquisition report**.

<img align="center" width="100%" src="how-do-utm-tags-work/utm-tags-google-analytics.png">

UTM tags provide very valuable insights into your traffic sources. They also allow you to segment cross channels. E.g., When only looking at the medium parameter, you can see what the impact is of 'social.'

Or, if you want to see how a campaign has performed, you can segment on the utm_campaign tag. It allows you to see the impact of all the traffic with the same campaign tag, but not the same medium.
<img align="center" width="100%" src="how-do-utm-tags-work/utm-tag-segmentation.jpg">

### Summary

UTM tags are a powerful mechanism to make analyzing the sources of your traffic a lot easier. It's a widely adopted technique and works out-of-the-box with all major analytics software. If used correctly and consistently they will make your life a lot easier.


If you can, you should always use the newest technology right? Wrong.

Chosing your Tech Stack: fancy or boring technology?


**A tech stack is the set of technologies to build a web or mobile application. If you can, you should always use the newest technology right? Wrong. In this article we explain how you can choose the right tech stack.**

### Why does your tech stack matter

A tech stack consists of components, because you don't want to start building with 0's and 1's. Examples of components are coding languages, databases, mailing platforms, etc. You choose components to reduce development time on your own unique product. You want to bring it to the market sooner and bring in new business features faster. Especially when you are developing a new product time is what you rarely have in abundance.

A tech stack is not just irrelevant underlying technology. It has a major impact on the flexibility and scalability of your business.

> "In general you want to build less and validate more"

### Not a good idea: ask your developers

You can ask your developers what would make them happy. They might tell you about the latest exciting language or framework. Here is the problem:

- The latest technology has not been tested extensively. This means that there are many bugs. Bugs are not a problem, as long as you (or the internet) know about them. But new technology comes with many unknown bugs. Those are dangerous because they might be hard to find and could cost you a lot of time. Time you cannot spend on adding business features.
- Adding new technology to the current tech stack could be a good investment and benefit the business goals, but many times, it also adds complexity. Complexity comes with a big long-term impact; it encourages bugs to slip in, make those bugs harder to find and will make it harder to add new people to your team(s) fast.

Of course we are generalizing here. In fact many developers do consider the long term business impact and will give you good advice.

A great reference is the blog post "Choose Boring Technology" from Dan McKinlley (<http://boringtechnology.club/>). He explains here the grim paradox for developers "this law of software is that you should probably be using the tool that you hate the most. You hate it because you know the most about it."

### So how to make a wise decision

In order to make a good decision, you need to look at the whole picture. These are some important factors you need to consider:

- Product characteristics: What is your unique selling point for the market. Do you have a good reason to build your own software, or can you (partly) use off the shelf products. In general you want to build less and validate more.
- Complexity: Will adding a component to your tech stack make your system harder to maintain, or will it make it easier? As discussed above complexity comes with a long-term penalty.
- Product maturity: is your business already validated by the market? If your product is mature you might think about changing flexibility for speed (scalability). Here you might start splitting up your product into microservices.
If your product has not reached that maturity we would advise you to adopt a flexible software architecture that you can refactor fast.
- Vendor lock-in: It’s cool to use tools from a specific vendor (think AWS DynamoDB, or Google spanner) but this would lock you to that specific vendor. If you ever wanted to change vendors this could take up alot of time.
- Legacy systems (or regulations): You might have to connect with an old system with a SOAP connection. Or there might be regulations in place for handling personal data in the cloud or using certain vendors. These are imitations you need to cope with while choosing your tech stack.
- Budget: if your budget is tight, the options are limited… but this makes it easier to choose!

### We are here to help

You might have noticed already: choosing your tech stack is not simple. New technology can be great, but often simple and boring technology is the better choice. There is not one perfect solution. Luckily, we have a lot of experience and can give you professional advice. Feel free to contact us and pick our brains!


Meet the founders Kees & Paul and find out why they started OpenTech

Introducing OpenTech: Kees & Paul


**In this first blog article we would like to introduce the OpenTech founders: Kees and Paul. And more important: why we started this. To really understand this, we quickly take you through our personal journeys.**

### Kees Veldhuizen

<img align="right" width="45%" src="why-we-started-opentech/kees.png">

After graduating at Twente University, Kees started working at the online department at Heineken. There Kees learned all the ins and outs of realizing digital projects within a corporate environment. After 5 years Kees came across a unique opportunity: be part of Kroodle, the innovation lab of Aegon. This was a steep learning curve for many skills like applying Lean Startup methods, building and managing an agile development team, mobile app development and stakeholder management. After 5 years Kees was ready to move beyond the corporate world and started his own companies.

Kees lives in Scheveningen with his wife and kid. Obviously he likes spending time on the beach and loves riding his bike through the dunes.

### Paul Wijhenke

<img align="left" width="45%" src="why-we-started-opentech/paul.png">

Paul started selling software when he was about 19. He always loved the art of software development as it was a game with an infinite number of pieces that could always be improved. Paul started software development on MS-Dos with Turbo-C / Clipper (anyone remembers this?), switched to Windows and added Server Operations to the mix.

Around the year 2000 Paul became very tired of the endless license loopholes and not being able to investigate your own problems so he switched to Linux and the OpenSource community. He learned all this when working for a Dutch ISP where he worked for 10 years as a Perl developer / System Architect. There he learned what it takes to build and maintain a system over a long period of time.

Paul lives in The Hague with his wife and dog. He likes travelling, running and being outdoors.

### How we met

Paul and Kees met years ago when Kees was working for Aegon and was building a pay-as-you-drive car insurance system under the Kroodle label. He needed a DevOps person to take care of backend software development and server operations. We really enjoyed working together as we continued to build this proof of concept application.
When the project was done we had a feeling that we are a good team and would like to work together some more. We have many ideas in common about how digital development should be done and decided that it was time to join our forces!

### Why we started OpenTech

It took some iterations on ideas but OpenTech really came together when we looked at the current market from a customer AND independent contractor perspective.

From a customer perspective, Kees knows the challenges from his experience at Heineken and Aegon. If you want to take control of development, you need to start your own inhouse development team. But where to start?

- How can I find digital professionals? Do I need recruiters? What skills do I need in the team? How do I know if a person is any good?
- Hiring employees would be nice, but what can I offer them when the project stops? And do I have time to build up this team?
- Hiring contractors is a faster option, but how do I make a team of them? And what to do if they suddenly leave?

From a independent software contractor perspective Paul also faced some challenges

- I can choose my own interesting projects. However, I often can't choose my own teammates. The team is an important factor for the quality and joy of work done.
- The current recruitment market structure does often not lead to a good job fit while taking up a lot of the money involved….

### So, OpenTech is doing it differently

Paul and Kees bundled all their experiences and learnings in OpenTech. With OpenTech we want to help people build great digital products and provide an alternative to the current recruiter/agency methods for getting smooth operating teams.

Instead of doing the same as other agencies we decided we wanted to have good people and bind them to us with a clear focus. We are a cooperation, so every member can decide on the company direction, leading to maximum engagement.

We don't hire sales people or recruiters. We believe in the power of the network. We attract professionals through our own network, because we believe that only professionals can recognize professionals. And we believe that we gain the trust of clients by our quality of work, not by smooth sales talks.

> "We make sure that you're not stuck with us forever, by working and documenting in a standard way, everyone can take over our work"
>
> -- OpenTech

Our clients will experience a smooth operating digital team, ready to roll from the start. Capacity can be scaled up and down.

And maybe the best thing: we believe in the OpenSource mentality. We make sure that you're not stuck with us forever, by working and documenting in a standard way, everyone can take over our work: our other OpenTech members or even your own development team.

Let us know if you want to have a chat, we are happy to help!


Blog

Understanding growth: how UTM tags work

Chosing your Tech Stack: fancy or boring technology?

Introducing OpenTech: Kees & Paul